Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I've just finished watching Shallow Hal. Great film, kinda odd, I gots love for Jack Black though.
Anyway I think the moral of the story was pretty much 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.
I tell no lies though, I've never really understood what that saying means. Maybe I'm gonna think it through right now...

Alright so, if you see something as beautiful, then it is beautiful, cos it's beautiful to you. And that's all that matters?
I'm gonna have to do some research.

Meaning

Literal meaning

Origin

This saying first appeared in the 3rd century BC in Greek. It didn't appear in its current form in print until the 19th century, but in the meantime there were various written forms that expressed much the same thought. In 1588, the English dramatist John Lyly, in his Euphues and his England, wrote:

"...as neere is Fancie to Beautie, as the pricke to the Rose, as the stalke to the rynde, as the earth to the roote."

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues

Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote:

Beauty, like supreme dominion
Is but supported by opinion

David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include:

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of 'The Duchess'. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there's the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which is the earliest citation of it that I can find in print.

Literal meaning. Okay, that's unhelpful. But at least I know its origins.
New website:

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that different people will find different things beautiful and that the differences of opinion don't matter greatly.

Not very eloquently put, but whatever, seems like my definition was right. Scorree.
(Italics won't leave me. Sad times.)

Let's mix things up...

Mmm, I agree wholeheartedly with this saying.
If you like something, then I don't think any sort of societal convention should have the power to make you feel like you can't like it.
Saying that, it's pretty much what does happen in life. Though these days anarchy is the thing.

I think it's crazy how fashion works. Mandy and my big sis are always ahead of fashion; it's kinda sick. Par exemple, Mando was doing the whole short jean thing way before the rest of the world was. And I remember when she first rolled her jeans up ankle length, we were hanging out, and I was like, I'm not sure if that works babes. But now, I think short jeans look sick. But this wasn't that long ago, so I don't understand how suddenly something that looked odd to me, looks good now. If that makes sense. It's pretty fascinating.
I love fashion. I love the runway. Models. Haute Couture. It's a wonderfully cruel world. But part of me is slightly dubious maybe. I dunno.

Fashion is oppressive. Discuss.

Trapped by one's desire
A desire to follow fashion
A desire to be noticed
But where is the passion?
Suppressed, we must conform
to what seems to be the norm.
Caged. Like a bird.
A bird that can't use its wings.
What use is a bird that can't fly for lack of wings?
Unlock the cage door.
Give her back her wings
and she'll fly, fly, high into the sky.
Soaring, fearless, accountable to none.
Fly into the sun, into the warm, yellow sun.
Encircled by the cotton-wool clouds
and the vast, blue space that goes on and on
and on and on and on and oh,
back to reality.
Back to the cage in which she's confined by her vanity.
Vanity Fair.
Vanity is not Fair.
What use is a bird that can't fly for lack of wings?

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